HOW THE PASSENGER PIGEON BECAME EXTINCT IN THE WILD?

 

At one time, the North American passenger pigeon was one of world’s most abundant bird species. In 1813, bird expert John James Audubon watched a flock of these passenger pigeons that was so huge it darkened the sky and took three days to fly over his location. By 1900, North America’s passenger pigeon had disappeared from the wild because of three factors: habitat loss as forests were cleared to make room for farms and cities, uncontrolled commercial hunting, and the fact that they were easy to kill. These birds were good to eat, their feathers made good pillows, and their bones were widely used for fertilizer. They were easy targets because they flew in gigantic flocks and nested in long, narrow, densely packed colonies. Beginning in 1858, passenger pigeon hunting became a big business. Shotguns, traps, artillery, and even dynamite were used. Hunters burned grass or sulfur below the pigeons’ roosts to suffocate the birds. Shooting galleries used live birds as targets. In 1878, a professional pigeon trapper made $60,000 by killing 3 million birds at their nesting grounds near Petoskey, Michigan. By the early 1880s, only a few thousand birds remained. At that point, recovery of the species was doomed. On March 24, 1900, a young boy in the U.S. state of Ohio shot the last known wild passenger pigeon.